Oakland Car Share and Outreach Program - Railvolution 2015
1. How Can Cities Bring
Shared Mobility to All
Residents?
OAKLAND’S CAR SHARE AND OUTREACH PROGRAM
Sara Barz
Shared Mobility Coordinator, City of Oakland, California
@skbarz
2. Car Share in Oakland, 2000s-2015Image 1 & 2: Google Streetview. Image 3: "Car2Go Amsterdam Smart ED cropped" by Car2Go_Amsterdam_Smart_ED_Herengracht.JPG: Brbblderivative work:
Mariordo (talk) - This file was derived from Car2Go Amsterdam Smart ED Herengracht.JPG:. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons -
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Car2Go_Amsterdam_Smart_ED_cropped.JPG#/media/File:Car2Go_Amsterdam_Smart_ED_cropped.JPG
7. Oakland Car Share and Outreach
Program
PROGRAM COMPONENTS
1. Regulatory reform
2. Outreach and incentives focused in East
Oakland neighborhoods
3. Evaluation
GRANT AWARD
1. $320,526 in CMAQ funds
2. Dedicated local match of $64,105 from
Measure B (county sales tax for transpo)
3. 27 months
4. Grant covers ~50% of program costs,
including staff time and materials
8. Outcomes: Frustration and Excitement
CHALLENGES WITH PARTNERSHIP
1.Public money moves slowly
2.Funding agencies don’t necessarily talk to
one another
RESPONSE FROM CAR SHARING ORGS
1.Very positive and open to regulation!
2.Car sharing organizations are willing to work
with the City to expand in new areas
3.Car sharing organizations have already
expressed interest in purchasing permits
9. Takeaways
1. To expand car share to low-income or
underrepresented areas, cities don’t
have to buy vehicles or build parking;
regulation and incentives can attract car
sharing organizations
2. To pursue equity, the City has got to
regulate the curb and car sharing
organizations
3. CMAQ funds can be used for shared
mobility initiatives
10. Thank you
SEE OUR POLICY MATERIALS : HTTP://BIT.LY/OAKCARSHARE
Sara Barz
sbarz@oaklandnet.com
@skbarz
Editor's Notes
My name is Sara Barz. I am the Shared Mobility Coordinator for the City of Oakland, California. I’m tasked with opening up the public right of way to shared mobility technologies. Right now, I am focused on delivering the car share policy the Oakland City Council passed in March 2015.
I want to acknowledge that there are many forms of Shared and On-Demand Mobility, but today I’m just going to talk about car share.
The idea of Oakland Car Share and Outreach program was conceived in summer 2014 in response to a call for grant funding (which I will discuss later). Due to delays, the program didn’t begin in earnest until August 2015.
Thus we’ve only been at this work for three months, and unfortunately I can’t speak to whether our attempts to introduce car sharing to low-income people and people of color will be successful. However I do hope you will take away our lessons learned about how to fund and structure similar programs in your own cities.
Before I discuss the program itself, it’s important to understand the relationship that the City has had with car share services since the start of car sharing services.
Namely there was none.
Until very recently, the Public Works Department (home of transportation within the City) has not seen itself as a regulator of the curb (even though we regulate the curb for meters, residential, and commercial parking). We’ve had more of a focus on delivering capital projects. (I think this is typical of many small to medium cities)
Thus since the early 2000s, 2 car sharing organizations, Zipcar and City CarShare, have parked on private property (with a few notable exceptions, I’ll discuss in a moment). Getaround just relaunched this year in Oakland with dedicated spaces on private property. What you see in this image is typical of the provision of car share in Oakland. This is a private lot with dedicated spaces for Zipcar and City CarShare and a Getaround space is just outside of the frame.
However there was one ill-fated experiment with on-street car share…
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In the mid 2000s, Public Works (my department) did attempt to allow dedicated spaces for car sharing, which resulted in about 14 car sharing vehicles that were allowed to park on-street and in a few municipal lots. However, these vehicles didn’t receive permits, and never had to pay a fee for the parking privilege or reimburse the City for the meter revenue. This situation has caused much heartache within Public Works, as you may imagine, and has proven difficult to address. About a decade later, these vehicles still “squat” in these on-street spaces.
Then in 2013 a start-up car sharing organization offered an oportunity to address this inconsistent approach …
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Enter car2go .
Car2go asked the City to permit one-way car sharing at the curb. Staff thought about it and instead of doing an RFP for a one-way car sharing provider, we decided to establish a citywide car sharing policy, which would permit both round-trip and one-way car sharing for mutliple providers.
We did this for two reasons
gave the City an opportunity to standardize the approach to permitting car share at the curb through out the City
gave the City an opportunity to regulate that car sharing should be distributed across the City, and in areas that the private car sharing market haven’t gone
Location maps of Zipcar and City CarShare in Oakland
Not fair to Zipcar – the zoom has aggregated many car sharing locations. It has just as many as City CarShare.
Locations North Oakland
Not much in East Oakland
Keep these maps or car sharing locations in mind when we look at demographics
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Demographics
Disparities of income (Median Household Income)
Dark purple represents a median income of over $75k per year
The lightest purple represents a household income of about $35k per year
Huge disparity in income
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Demographics:
Concentration non-white population
Central part of Oakland and East Oakland is where you find people of color
North part of the City is where White Households live
But, Political climate really cares about equity
We’re very sensitive to Gentrification, Displacement, lack Distribution of Wealth from a burgeoning tech economy in the Bay Area
just created a Department of Race and Equity
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Staff was keen to incude an equity objective in the policy
But we’re not naïve, we knew needed a way to pay for it
While politics are in favor of equity, they are not in favor of spending general fund money for transportation
changing bureaucracy is not cheap — it can be just as expensive as pouring concrete
setting aside money for equity initiatives is also not cheap
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We got lucky!
the region’s metropolitan planning organization (MPO), issued a call for grant funding to expand car sharing services across the regionin July 2014
Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds which are often used for capital projects, can also be used for staff time and programmatic costs
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The call prioritized projects that would extend car share to low-income groups
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We knew the objectives of the Car Share policy as well as our strengths and our weaknesses and proposed the following program:
regulatory reform: We proposed the City would take care of creating permits for car share, regulating the curb, etc.
outreach: The City would partner with a respected local transportation advocacy organization on outreach and to create the incentives to increase adoption rates
evaluation: The City would partner with the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley to evaluate the environmental, economic, and social benefits from car sharing expansion on public property in Oakland
Oakland Car Share and Outreach Program with its three components was funded!
$320,526 in CMAQ funds
Dedicated local match of $64,105 from Measure B (county sales tax for transpo)
27 months
Grant covers ~50% of program costs, including staff time and materials
Near-term outcomes from starting this program three months ago:
Left Column
Public money moves slowly – the grant was awarded in late 2014, but only became available to spend in September 2015.
Funding agencies don’t necessarily talk to one another
While our MPO programmed the funds, the state DOT, Caltrans, administers the funds
And we had issues with what was proposed and what can be funded with federal money, as interpreted by the state DOT
Happy to talk more about this in the Q&A
Right Column
Very positive!
Willing to work with the City to expand in areas where they haven’t gone
CSOs have already expressed interest in purchasing permits
Takeaways
To expand car share, cities don’t have to buy vehicles or build parking
Cities shouldn't get into the operations game, leave that to firms
regulations and incentives seem to work to introduce car share to new areas
To pursue equity, the City has got to regulate the curb and car sharing
advocates could have complained about the inequities of car sharing in Oakland before we passed the Car Share Policy in March 2015, but there is nothing the City could have done before there was a policy
With a policy, we’ve acknowledged that it is the City’s responsibility to extend these services and others can hold us accountable
CMAQ funds can be used for shared mobility initiatives
advocates and City staff can lobby MPOs to program CMAQ for funding programs like MTC’s car sharing program
grant funding can buy staff and consultants time to figure out out to fund the program sustainably
I’d like to
Thank you for your time
Encourage you to check out our policy grant documents that I have made available in a public dropbox folder at bit.ly/oakcarshare
Welcome your questions during the Q&A